Spread the Word

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Week 2 in Da Bronx...Performers and Beggars on the Subway?

Hello everyone!!

Haha so I'm just loving it here in the Bronx. I feel like I'm in adream a lot of the time because it is just such a different place thananything I am used to, but it's great. I'm starting to get used tobeing the "odd one out"....we are literally the only white personyou'll see walking around the streets of the South Bronx haha. Ourarea is everything in the Bronx west of Grand Concourse and south ofFordam Rd. if anyone is interested in looking it up on a map. Thepeople here are great and definitely keep life interesting. I don'tknow if I've told you about the performers and beggars on the subway,yet, but they are some of my favorites. Here in the Bronx there aren'ta lot of performers like paint-bucket drummers or dancers like therewere in Manhattan, but there are a lot of kids who go to BJs (kind oflike Costco) and buy big boxes of fruit snacks and go train to trainselling them. And then there are just a ton of beggars. They all saylike the same thing. They walk onto the train, stand there until thetrain starts, and then say, "Hello everybody, sorry to bother you.Some of you may have seen me before and some of you may have not. Myname is (insert name). I am on my way to a shelter. I am not a drugaddict. I don't drink. And I could use some help. If anyone can spareany change, whether it be a dollar, a quarter or even a penny, yes,ONE penny, it would be appreciated. God bless and have a safe day."Haha I almost have it memorized!! But yeah, so it's really hardbecause you want to help them out, but you literally can't. Onaverage, I probably see 10 of those people a day. If I were to give adollar to each of them, that's like $300 dollars a month! I can'tafford that! I don't even get that much money for food and personalitems each month. That and if you do make it a regular thing to helpthem, then they start targeting all missionaries because they thinkthat they have money to give out and that they're all just nice whiteboys that are willing to give away money.

So this month the church is putting on an initiative called "He is theGift". I don't know if any of you know anything about it, butbasically what it is is a push from the Church to help people rememberthat Christ is what Christmasis all about. The Church has literallydropped millions of dollars on this project. They've spent like 2million dollars or something crazy like that to rent out a jumbotronin Time Square with the ad for it on it. They've made a video calledHe is the Gift and it is GREAT!! You HAVE to watch it. So yeah,they've really pushed for missionaries to talk about He is the Giftand to hand out cards and show the video to everyone. So that's whatwe've been doing!!

This Sundaywas the 1st PresidencyChristmasDevotional, and it wasawesome!! I hope you were all able to see it! It totally put me in theChristmasSpirit.

This Sundaywas also fast and testimony meeting! Itwas...disappointing. Haha no just kidding...it was actually reallygreat, it just wasn't as exciting as I was hoping it was going to be.I was expecting a bunch of crazy stuff that usually happens, buteveryone said that this was probably the calmest, most spiritual fastSunday's in a long while.

Yes I have been able to get rid of most of the cockroaches. We've beenslowly destroying all of their hiding places, but there are still acouple I see every day. It's getting there, though!

So we only have two investigators, really. They are two brothers thatare like 16 and 11 or so. They are awesome! I haven't really had alesson with them and they haven't been coming to church lately, but weare really pushing to see them this week.

Me and Elder Sorensen are doing great. He is from Las Vegas, NV and is20 years old like me. He is just a big goof all of the time haha. He'sstill pretty weird sometimes, but we get along just fine. We jokearound a lot and have been able to talk about a lot of things, whichis really nice. He'd been in the Bronx for 6 weeks before I got here,but he actually started his mission out in the other side of the Bronxin the Olmstead zone. He was there for 4 1/2 months I think. He's beenon his mission for exactly a year! He hit his year mark last Thursday.

Well, sorry if those answers to your questions seemed rushed, but theywere haha. I've gotta get going but I love you all so much! Have anawesome week. Merry Christmas:)